Springpad Revisited

Often my reviews here at WebWorkerDaily are peeks at beta or early release versions of an application or service. While I think it is useful to provide these sneak peeks, it is often in the first couple months of a product’s life when a lot of usability enhancements get put in to place.

So I decided to revisit a few of the applications I was impressed with in review, but hadn’t personally adopted, to see how they fare after a bit more cooking time. The first of these is Springpad, the online notebook organizer I last looked at back in November.

Advertisement

The things that most impressed me about Springpad originally are still there: that it’s a “whole life” organizer, the ready-made Springpads, and the Personal Organizer area, which aggregates and consolidates content from all of my individual Springpads to master lists.

But over time Springpad has added a couple of very nice usability tweaks. Most noticeable is a design refresh that moves the navigation to a slide away “drawer” that tucks itself out of the way when not in use.

In addition to the bit of freed-up space, hiding the navigation out of the way allows you to really focus on the tasks at hand. If you prefer to keep it visible, you can pin it open as well.

They have also added a very handy bookmarklet, the Springpad Clipper, that lets you grab highlighted content from any web page and easily transfer it in to the Springpad page of your choosing. This makes it great for capturing notes and photos as you are doing research, or even just to flag things to look at later. I also like that it works in any browser and isn’t just Firefox-specific.

The quality of the ready-made Springpads has also improved, with the newer ones getting more interactive and detailed. The task-oriented Springpads are a good way to get up and running quickly, but if you prefer you can still create your own from scratch.

So, overall, while it lacks the ubiquity of a tool like Evernote for general information capturing, Springpad has matured quite a bit in a few short months and continues to be a fine option for an online organizer.

What do you think? Could Springpad be the whole life organizer for you?

Springpad has become absolutely invaluable to me. I’m still getting used to their new interface and the search still leaves a little to be desired, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons and as a company, they love feedback and interaction with their users. I am going to routinely beg them for MS Office integration (a great way to monetize their service) as it would be great to import/export to One Note and Tasks to Outlook, etc…

What a great tool! I’m trying to get all of my documents, files, usernames & passwords organized on my webtop for GoEverywhere but this looks like an interesting tool for personal organization (something I can always improve on!)

It is getting there. I still find that I like various features from SpringPad, OneNote, and EverNote. The thing I don’t like about EverNote is the view that I am stuck with. I don’t want to scroll to the bottom of my note and keep going to the next note.

I want to be able to have pages in my notebooks. For example, I created a notebook for school and then I want my classes to have their own sub-notebooks or pages. These in turn would have my notes for the class.

I like the interface to SpringPad. It is simple and elegant. It also seems to give me more flexibility for my school notebooks in terms of to-do lists and such. I think this could be it for me, but I am not sure. I do like the fact that I could have everything I want in one location. No more need for RTM and EverNote.

SpringPad has become a “whole-life organizer” for me! Everything from the calendar to helping me with my budget, and even being there with the clipper so I can grab pieces of information wherever I am on the web and file them the way I like. I have used Evernote for a long time, but Springpad is becoming my “go-to” application for everything.